Tag: activism

Yesterday I got my haircut. The only other customer was 99 year-old May.

May was tiny and withdrawn; a living contrast to the extravagantly decorated salon. Her daughter and the hairdresser helped her into the chair. She said little, just watched herself in the mirror. The hairdresser chattered away, unnoticed.

After a while, May interrupted distractedly. She read, slowly and intently, from a printed quote on the hairdresser’s mirror: “Life is too short to be anything but happy.”

(Preemptive apologies to my non-Instagram readers.)

Let’s address the elephant in our collective virtual room:Why do we spend endless hours photographing nature but very few actually defending it?

Social media is famous for its ability to escalate social movements for change. Consider the Egyptian Uprising, #Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, #BringBackOurGirls, and the #IceBucketChallenge for a start. But all of these movements were/are centered on Twitter, with Facebook as a sidekick. What about Instagram?*

This fall, Socality Barbie brought Instagram’s #liveauthentic movement’s artificiality into light. The press went wild, attacking the culture for it’s glaringly obvious inauthenticity. In my favorite article, Hilary Oliver argues compellingly that the #liveauthentic culture is a cry for meaning from the millennials’ that stems from our suburban, programmed, and privileged childhoods (read here).